Saturday, April 5, 2014

Conservation in Greenwich

We are in full spring finally in Greenwich, and since Earth
Day is in April, we at the Oral History Project find our thoughts turning to
the environment and to conservation. We have many interviews in our collection
on these subjects by narrators who have worked tirelessly to preserve and
protect the natural heritage of our town.

The first of our histories tracing efforts to safeguard the
land and water of Greenwich is to be found in one of our published anthologies
with interviews spanning the 1980s, entitled appropriately enough, Conservation in Greenwich. It is
comprised of oral history interviews with citizen-conservationists, Eugene
Curry, Anne Hubbell French, Barbara Kitchel Girdler, Howard Hennington, and
Phoebe Milliken.

In the first interview, narrator Barbara Girdler describes
the origins of conservation efforts in Greenwich. Going back to the 1940s, she
cites the establishment of the Audubon Center, crediting it with the start of
conservation education in town. “They started with birds,” she says, but soon
discovered, “it’s all of a piece and they’d have to just look at the whole
picture.”

In the 1950s the center became a liaison group with the
garden clubs, soon beginning conservation work on Greenwich Point. At the time
of the interview, 1982, members of the Greenwich Point committee were working
on a master plan for which they had secured the blessings of the Parks
Department.

Eagle Statue, Greenwich PointToday the eagle has a nest on its top. The bronze eagle was originally placed in 1979

Other instrumental conservation efforts she cites include
the opening in 1968 of the Greenwich Point Advisory Committee’s exhibition
center, the state Coastal Wetlands Act of 1970, the Greenwich Environmental
Action Group whose work began in 1970. (More on that to come.) These efforts
and more formed the basis for laws and ordinances that guide the care and
handling of our natural resources in Greenwich today.

The second interview in this collection is with Phoebe M.
Milliken, conducted in 1986, about the Byram River Gorge Preserve.Ms. Milliken begins with expressions of deep
appreciation for the land, noting the native American Indians and the Quakers
who long ago had stewardship of the land. Of the Quakers, who settled the lands
of the Byram River in the 1700s, she says, “They knew very well where to place
their houses, not down close to the river. They took the best advantage of where
the sun rose and set and where the prevailing winds were coming from. They were
not going to be caught in floods.”

Scene from the Gimbel Sanctuary

The intentions of those involved in the Byram River Gorge
Preserve were to keep the land as preserved and protected as it had been under
the care of its previous settlers. The key was to secure private lands into the
hands of the Land Trust overseen at the time by the Greenwich Audubon Society.
These early planners also included the Nature Conservancy in their efforts. One
of the first land donations came from Mrs. Alva B. Gimbel. The Gimbel
Foundation gave thirty-seven acres to the Audubon Society Greenwich Chapter in
1972. John Fereri gave another
forty-three acres in 1995. Today eighty acres of this land is called the Gimbel
Sanctuary, connected to the Nature Conservancy’s Byram River Gorge Preserve to
the north.

Another of the interviews is by a narrator with a similar
love of the land, Anne Hubbell French, whose family had lived near the Mianus
River Gorge for many years. Her interview on the Mianus River Gorge Preserve is
co-narrated with R. Eugene Curry, who came to the project after its inception.
As Ms. French tells it, the purpose of the preserve was “to set aside this land
surrounded by the steep hills to be protected in perpetuity, forever wild.” She
goes on to call the preserve a “wilderness island in a suburban sea.” While the
land was to remain forever wild, it was not to be unavailable to the public.
Instead, it was designed to provide hiking trails open to the public, the only
restrictions at the time, “no picnics or dogs.” The narrators credit Gloria
Anable, among other interested citizens, for having created the preserve, with
work on the project going back to the early 1950s. The Mianus River Gorge was
the first of the land projects of the Nature Conservancy.

In another interview, Howard H. Hennington (interview
conducted in 1987) describes how the Greenwich Audubon Society of Greenwich
went from being about birds only to contributing to the preservation of lands,
such as the Byram River Gorge Preserve. Similarly, in an interview in 1982,
Barbara Girdler describes how the Land Trust went from being under the
auspicious of the Greenwich Audubon in the early 70s to later being set up as a
separate entity, its purpose, too, to acquire private lands, mostly by gift.
Today the Greenwich Land Trust has more than 737 acres of diverse woodlands
under its care.

Greene Preserve, Greenwich Land Trust

In the final interview of the collection, Barbara Girdler
focuses on what were in the 1980s ongoing efforts to ensure regulations protective
of air, land, and water quality. She comments on the Audubon chapter and its
educational programs, the garden clubs, the members of the Greenwich Point
committee, all active and committed to the preservation of our natural
resources. At one point she makes a distinction between those she calls
“aesthetic conservationists,” who save things because they are beautiful and
those who have come to appreciate “the oneness of nature.” She explains the
concept thus: “It’s just all of a piece, and you mustn’t rend the fabric
anywhere. You pull one thread, and the whole thing comes apart.”

Lucky for us, these early committed citizen-conservationists
were of the second kind.